by Alan Judd
‘Not a flicker on our screens,’ said Charles, ‘but I can ask stations to report any overseas links with like-minded groups. And they can ask their liaisons.’
‘Thanks, but there’s something else I wanted to ask you about.’ Michael bent his head and moved a few feet away from the others, lowering his voice. ‘Does the name Deep Blue mean anything? Not the chess computer but something else. Wasn’t there a case, an old Sovbloc case on your side, in which it featured? I seem to remember something about it. Was it the codename for the case? I can’t be sure of anything these days. To be honest, I’ve not been feeling too good.’
‘Your memory’s better than you think. It wasn’t a code-name but there was a case that featured it, the Badger case. I was the case officer. Didn’t run for long. Dead case now. As is Badger himself.’
‘It’s just that we picked up some Internet chatter. Someone we haven’t yet identified who has extremist connections was saying they – whoever “they” are – were going to get hold of Deep Blue and cause havoc. We can’t work out who or what Deep Blue is, whether it’s a thing or a person. I remembered it as a phrase associated with some case or other of your lot’s but clearly it wasn’t your agent – ex-agent – from what you say.’
‘It had a colloquial meaning which I think I remember correctly but I’d need to check I’ve got it right.’ The meeting was about to start and they were called to order. ‘Let me get back to you.’
The Prime Minister wasn’t chairing this time, his place taken by the Home Secretary. Alongside him was the new Foreign Secretary, Elspeth Jones, to whom, as Chief of MI6, Charles was answerable. He had had close and friendly relations with her predecessor, who had appointed him, but his meetings with Elspeth so far had been brief, formal and cautious. There was nothing to complain of but she had turned down the first submission they had put up to her, concerning Saudi Arabia, on the grounds that the political fall-out if anything went wrong was too great to be worth the risk. That was her prerogative and was the reason the submission system existed, but he sensed that it might become the pattern; she was no risk-taker, unlike her predecessor who had been unexpectedly demoted – moved sideways and brought into the innermost circle was how Downing Street spinners put it – to Chief Whip.
The meeting took its usual course, surveying threats and looming scenarios at home and abroad, with the heads of agencies and departments giving succinct opinions and the Home Secretary, unconstrained by the Prime Minister and taking advantage of Elspeth’s inexperience, holding forth at length. The only unusual feature was the presence of two special political advisors, Elspeth’s and the Home Secretary’s. Most SPADs were not security cleared and neither of these would have been permitted to attend if the PM had chaired. By unspoken agreement, the heads of agencies and permanent secretaries all said less than they would have.
During the longueurs of the Home Secretary’s peroration Charles studied the SPADs. Elspeth had introduced hers by name only – Robin Cleveley – with no explanation. Having never been in government before, she had perhaps assumed that SPADS were acceptable everywhere. Maybe they had long been political intimates, he knowing all her secrets and helping steer her to where she was, and it had not occurred to her to keep him out of anything. Her private secretary should have warned her. Charles decided he would have to mention it, if no one else did, but would start by getting his own private secretary to raise it with Elspeth’s.
Cleveley, tall and tie-less, reminded him of a type he had come across first at university and later in Whitehall: confident, presentable young men with quick intelligence, rapid articulacy and the air of always being on the inside track. More attentive to superiors than inferiors, socially adroit, personally ambitious and committed to the political causes they served, they were essentially courtiers, ready, willing, anxious to please. And like courtiers of old they could, on occasion, stab.
The Home Secretary’s SPAD was a woman, Melanie Stokes, short and dark-haired with sharp features and a matching quickness of manner. Charles could do nothing about her since MI6 had no locus with the Home Office, but Michael Dunton did and would surely not approve. She intervened only once in the discussion, when the Home Secretary, looking at Michael, said that the Triple A, though sometimes posing a public order threat, should not be regarded as a security threat. It was essentially a political party operating above board and we had to be careful not to demonise it.
‘Political movement,’ said Melanie. ‘A movement, not a party. It has no constitution. Sees itself as an expression of political will.’
The Home Secretary nodded. ‘Thank you, Melanie, quite right. A movement, not a party. And not a security threat.’
The others looked for a response from Michael Dunton. As DG he had statutory authority to decide what was and was not a threat to the state, but he remained silent. Keeping his powder dry pending private discussion, Charles hoped.
After the meeting, Charles moved towards Elspeth, who was being talked at by the Home Secretary. He had no agenda with her that morning other than wanting to establish more familiar and easy relations, with more regular access. But as he edged towards her Robin Cleveley interposed himself with a broad smile and outstretched hand.
‘I’ve never met a C before.’ He used the acronym by which Chiefs of MI6 were traditionally known in Whitehall, although their names had long been public knowledge. ‘Robin Cleveley, the Foreign Secretary’s Man Friday.’
‘And much more than a Friday man, I’m sure,’ said Charles, smiling in turn. It paid to be pleasant to those whose legs you wanted to cut off.
‘I was wondering whether I might call on you for a chat. It seems to me, on the basis of admittedly little observation, that it might be helpful for the Secretary of State to have easier access to your views.’
It was exactly what Charles wanted, but not via Cleveley. ‘Happily, if you could bear to come to Croydon.’
Robin smiled again. ‘Croydon, removal therefrom, is another thing we need to talk about.’
This would have been music to Charles’s ears but for the medium. He had been promised by Elspeth’s predecessor that MI6 would return to Westminster, and had told his staff they would, but nothing had happened. Cleveley’s initiative and his irritating assumption of equality made him feel he was being treated as another courtier, even as a supplicant. For the time being he had no option but to appear to go along with it; to show irritation in Whitehall’s undeclared wars was to show weakness.
That night, with Sarah in deep sleep beside him, he listened to Big Ben striking four over the rooftops of Westminster. Perhaps she was right about eating late, though it didn’t seem to affect her. He was recalling the start of the case that featured Deep Blue, decades before.
The 1980s
The Paris station, all eight of them in those days of close liaison with the French on Sovbloc and terrorist casework, were squeezed around the table in the safe speech room while Angus Copplestone, head of station, gave edited highlights of the ambassador’s weekly meeting. Pale, black-haired, energetic and ambitious, an earlier version of Robin Cleveley, Angus spent as much time as he could with the ambassador. ‘I must say I find myself eye to eye with him on this issue,’ he would frequently say, as if announcing a surprise.
This time it was the ambassador’s edict on SIS reporting on French issues – deep-chat bilaterals, Angus called it, which included anything from French positions on European Community negotiations to internal political developments and views on British policy. ‘He’s not keen on us reporting it, as you know, even if we do discover something the Foreign Office hasn’t. It should be handled through normal Foreign Office reporting channels. I must say, I have some sympathy. It’s not really secret intelligence, doesn’t come from recruited agents, just officials with whom we’re in liaison who say a bit more than they should. In future, therefore, anything anyone picks up should be reported to me only, orally not on paper. I’ll discuss it with the ambassador and we’ll decide how it should b
e reported to London. If it is reported – and it probably won’t be – he or I will do it through Foreign Office channels. There’s also no question of cultivating potential French sources or seeking intelligence on France in any form without clearance at every stage, probably all the way up to the Foreign Secretary. And it’s most unlikely we’d get it. Does everyone understand that?’ He looked at them all, his gaze finally settling on Charles. ‘So, Charles, no more surprise weekend reports to London from your talkative French liaison partner about his government’s attitudes towards the British rebate. The Foreign Office has already had Number Ten on about it, wanting more.’
‘I thought the government would like to know about it, with these negotiations coming up.’
‘Not your call. Above your pay grade.’
Angus’s eyes stayed on Charles’s for a few seconds, perhaps waiting for the acknowledging nod that was not forthcoming. For no reason Charles could define, there had been an unspoken antipathy between him and his head of station since the day he arrived. They had not argued or fallen out, there had been no overt hostility, but from the moment they shook hands he had sensed a mutual lack of sympathy, an almost intellectual estrangement. There being no issue over which they had disagreed, he had concluded it was a matter of temperament. Angus’s obvious ambition and his unquestioning self-belief provoked in Charles a juvenile desire for mischievous opposition, which manifested itself as flippancy. Most of the time he hid it, but he felt that Angus picked up on it.
‘The other thing,’ Angus continued, returning his gaze to the others, ‘is that the visiting Russian trade delegation is out of bounds. The one that’s here following up last year’s Paris Air Show. Charles’s French liaison friends will be crawling all over them anyway so there’s no need for us to get involved and risk muddying the waters. More to the point, the ambassador’s pretty pally with the head of the delegation, a man called Federov, and he won’t want you treading on his toes in your size twelves, Charles. Federov’s a smooth operator, apparently, Party apparatchik, Central Committee fixer, blue-eyed boy of Soviet business so far as French ministers are concerned. The ambassador’s trying to get his delegation invited to London on the back of this visit, so a big Keep off the Grass sign, OK?’
The meeting moved on to everyone’s plans for the week ahead. At the end Angus asked Charles to stay behind. ‘Not many morsels on your plate at the moment, I know,’ he said as the steel door closed on the others. ‘Not your fault, of course, that we’re unable to do everything we want but with this secondee from MI5 coming out to take over all your IRA stuff with French liaison you’ll have even fewer toys to play with. And as everyone else’s plates are pretty full I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to take on a little chore.’
He smiled as he pushed a paper with a list of agent numbers across the table. His smile, like his regretful tone, always seemed too deliberate. None of the numbers meant anything to Charles except that they signified individuals rather than subjects.
‘Pensioners,’ Angus continued, ‘former agents of various nationalities living in France to whom the Office pays pensions for one reason or another. Some of them go back to the Second World War and we have to check annually that they’re still alive. You might find you can cross a couple off. They drop off their perches every year.’ He smiled at the thought. ‘Interesting reading for anyone with time for that sort of thing. Normally I get one of the secretaries to do it but they’ve all got more important things to do at the moment. You don’t have to do much. Just look them up over a cup of tea or coffee or glass of whatever stronger stuff is keeping them going.’
The files were mostly single volumes, beginning with summaries culled from multi-volume files held in Head Office of the agents’ services before they retired to France. They also comprised records of visits, pension payments, illnesses, requests and, in one or two cases, deaths of spouses. Others, whose connections with British officialdom were no secret, contained copies of invitations to the embassy’s annual Queen’s Birthday garden party.
Charles spent the rest of the day in the station, leafing through them. He hated days spent at his desk without getting out and about, though his colleagues seemed not to mind. Officers on most stations were generally out meeting people, which was how they got their business, or doing their Foreign Office cover jobs partly with that aim in mind. But Angus equated work with physical presence and liked to see his officers at their desks, reading and writing; out of sight meant out of control. But out of sight was where Charles intended to be, once he had decided his order of visits. Two were pleasingly distant, one near the Swiss border, another in Cherbourg. The others were in and around Paris but he reckoned he could stretch them to several days, allowing half a day each.
His first was to an elderly French couple who lived in the rue d’Astorg, not far from the Arc de Triomphe and near a corner café he sometimes used. He lunched there and called on them afterwards. They had served both SIS and SOE (Special Operations Executive) during the war and had been betrayed while working for the latter. They had survived torture and imprisonment but had been ignored by de Gaulle and successive French governments because they had worked for the British. SIS had paid them a small pension ever since their liberation.
Their small apartment was crowded with ornaments and knick-knacks. Charles had the impression of quiet, forgotten lives and of absolute dependency on each other. They seemed as grateful for the brief annual contact, with the bottle and flowers he had brought, as for their pension. It reminded them they had been part of something, they said. Also that, ‘London never forgets’. It took little prompting to get them to talk about their own operational pasts. Charles much preferred hearing about the war and early Cold War to processing paper back in the station. But they did not talk about their torture and imprisonment.
His next visit was to Machemont, a small town an hour or so outside Paris. It was not clear from the file why Josef, the elderly Russian émigré, was paid a pension. The summary showed that he had been imprisoned in Russia but not for working for SIS; he had been recruited only after leaving. Since then he had performed various services, mostly introductions to or personality reports on visiting Russian officials whom he cultivated as a sympathetic freelance journalist. His intelligence stream, always modest, had petered out over the years as his access dwindled. He had been paid more generously than the results merited and the file recorded his award of a pension without indicating why. It was likely that successive case officers had liked him and had found it more congenial to be nice than to acknowledge declining productivity. His French wife seemed wealthy in her own right. The most recent paper was a letter from Head Office pointing out that, although a pensioner, he was still classified as an agent and that he saw himself as continuing to work for the Office, regarding his pension as a salary. There was no indication that he was in need of money and no prospect of his regaining any useful access; he should therefore be terminated, politely and considerately, with – if the station thought necessary – a year’s pension as a terminal bonus.
Angus had written on the letter: Clearly one of the Old Scroungers Brigade. Terminate without bonus if poss but do terminate. That was how Charles met Josef, and how the Badger case started.
Chapter Three
The 1980s
‘Another glass, Mr Thoroughgood. Or a little cognac?’
‘Thank you, Josef, but, no, really, I’m driving. Anyway, it’s Charles, please.’
‘Yvette, some coffee for Mr Thoroughgood.’
‘It’s Charles, please call me Charles.’
Josef shook his head. ‘To me you are Mr Thoroughgood. It is a sign of respect. Not for you personally – though I do respect you, even after one lunch – but for the Service. Yvette can call you Charles and you must call me Josef but I insist on respecting the Service that helped me in difficult times when I was first here and which fights the war we fight together. My first case officer, Major Mackenzie, he taught me that the Service always
keeps its word. You did not know him, you are absurdly young. Everyone is.’
He raised his glass again, his bright dark eyes almost disappearing in his round wrinkled face. He had bushy grey eyebrows and thick iron-grey hair. Everything about him was thick: his stubby fingers, his wide head, his shoulders, neck and thighs, which stretched his trousers. He looked as if he had been compressed and compacted by enormous forces and now could be compressed no more, like a dense, irreducible rock. But a jovial and vigorous rock.
Yvette, diminutive and almost silent, left them. They were lunching on the terrace overlooking a hay meadow at the back of the attractive and modest chateau outside Marchemont. It had been occupied by German troops during the Second World War and Allied shelling had knocked it about, destroying both wings. ‘It is my contribution to the Great Patriotic War,’ Josef had said, ‘to occupy the fascist headquarters.’
He held his glass and looked at Charles. ‘Are you another fly-by-night or are you my new case officer? I regard myself as still in arms, you know, still working, though it is seldom anyone comes to debrief me and most of the time I have nothing to report anyway.’
He spoke in mixed French and English, the latter heavily accented, cultivated and archaic, a voice from another world. Charles liked listening to it, but didn’t like what he himself had to say next. ‘I’m not your new case officer, I’m afraid.’
‘Another fly-by-night, then? You visit to see if I am alive, to check you are not paying a corpse?’
‘I’m supposed to terminate you.’
